MK downplays succession row

Speaking to a public meeting at Perambur, a suburb of North Chennai here on Sunday night after inaugurating a long-delayed mammoth flyover, Karunanidhi said that the post now occupied by Stalin, ‘Thunai Muthalamaichar’ was rendered in English as ‘Deputy Chief Minister’.

Punning on the Tamil word ‘Thunai’, which also means being a ‘helper’ or ‘assistant’, the 86-year-old DMK patriarch pointed out that Stalin as a minister “is truly assisting me in my functions, correctly and faithfully reading my thoughts on the welfare measures needed for the people and translating them into reality”, to drive home that too much should not be read into the post his younger son was occupying in Government.
With Stalin and other senior DMK Ministers including Dayanidhi Maran at his side, the chief minister told the gathering that the deputy chief minister was only “performing his duty” in that spirit. Whether this mollifies his elder son who is away on an official tour of Australia, remains to be seen.

Emphasising that ‘North Chennai’ was akin to a ‘pilgrimage centre’ for the Dravidian Movement, as the DMK was born here in 1949, just like Jerusalem was to Christians, Mecca and Medina to the Muslims and Rameshwaram to the Hindus, Karunanidhi named the bridge after the late Murasoli Maran, who had strived hard to get this flyover built in Perambur.
DH News Service